Similar to many school districts across the nation, Consolidated High School District 230 in Illinois has had a significant increase in chronic absence since the Covid-19 pandemic. District 230’s three high schools saw their chronic absence rate peak at 21% in the 2022-23 school year, but it has steadily decreased to 19.1% in 2024-25. We sat down with Charles Ovando, assistant superintendent of Student Support and Development at District 230, to hear how the district is addressing this issue.
Choosing the Focus
A couple years ago, District 230 revamped its district improvement plan. “We took fifteen metrics that we were using to determine the status of our organizational health and highlighted five as focus areas,” Charles explained. One of the focus areas chosen was a long term commitment to reducing chronic absence. “We decided there was no single vector to address chronic absence,” he said. As a result, the district identified four different pathways to tackle the issue: policy, process and practice modifications, communication, data input/output, and building level interventions.
Gathering the Data
Currently, District 230 is in the second year of its initiative to improve student attendance. “Last year we did a lot of work on the data, to make sure it was as clean and accurate as possible,” Charles said. District 230 collects its data using a student information system developed by Skyward®, along with other peripheral tools such as School Technology’s SchoolTRAK®. “There is a level of data input that focuses on daily operations such as the coding of period absences. One policy change we’ve made is absence thresholds by period which allows us to hone in on specific problem areas.”
Collaboration
A key to developing and implementing new policies to address chronic absence is improving collaboration within the district. The district has an organizational structure that has district-level to student-level committees that meet on a regular basis. These committees include representatives from various academic departments, as well as administrators, teachers, counselors, social workers, support staff and students, which allow the district to get feedback and problem solving from a variety of perspectives, said Charles. The district also uses ThoughtExchange®, an AI powered product, as a tool to receive feedback. “We send surveys and people respond and can rate other responses,” Charles said. This allows the three or four issues that are really resonating with the community to rise to the top, which “gives us a good starting point to take back to a committee to unpack and discuss,” he added.
A Revised Attendance Policy
Through these discussions, District 230 revamped the attendance policy that has been implemented across all schools within the district. “We felt like there was a concern coming out of Covid that indicated we needed to reaffirm that attendance matters, why it matters, and what connections it has to student performance and behavior. The reason we initiated an attendance policy change in our Parent/Student Handbook was to address a gap that had become evident in our analysis of existing policy and practices,” he said. The new policy makes a clear distinction between excused and unexcused absences. It includes a threshold of seven excused absences; additional absences are marked unexcused unless additional documentation for a valid cause is provided. “We also modified our make-up policy by creating a component to allow students to earn up to 75% of an earned score for make-up work tied to an absence that was unexcused,” explained Charles.
Communication
Now that a new policy was about to go into effect, the district developed a communication campaign, and chose “Attendance Matters” for its slogan. A key new initiative launched with the Attendance Matters campaign was attendance progress reports. “We started sending attendance progress reports quarterly to families with a color-coded categorizing system. So, if you are in the red zone, you’re chronically absent, yellow indicates you’re at risk of becoming chronically absent, blue shows that you are on track, and green means you have exceptional attendance. Each report goes out with a slightly different narrative based on the attendance category. At risk and chronically absent categories are provided with links to resources for parents and guardians. For example, there’s a resource we put together with tips for talking with your student about attendance and why it matters,” said Charles. “We didn’t want to just message out, ‘hey your student is doing great’ or ‘your student is at risk,’ without tying it to what a parent or caregiver can do, what it means and who can be contacted at the school for additional information and help.”
On top of the quarterly attendance reports, the district sent out a number of messages from the district superintendent. The district created a resource page on its website dedicated to Attendance Matters, along with a FAQ form and a contact section that allowed for unique questions that need a direct answer. These resources can be automatically translated by the website into the three most common nonEnglish languages in the district, explained Charles.
The district also made sure to have clear communication internally with all staff across the district, including teachers, counselors and administrators. “We created a separate internal site for all of our staff that goes more granular into the attendance information related to the new policy, including how to apply the make-up policy …it’s one of the top five drop-down resources staff can access anytime they log into our system,” he said.
Looking Forward
When asked what kind of impact the district is seeing as a result of the new initiatives, Charles said, “It’s still too early to know what kind of impact our new policy and practices have, but we are seeing promising anecdotal data…for example, there are students saying they are thinking differently about missing school with the new policy because they don’t want to get in a position where they are sick with a cold but are on their eighth absence and their mom’s not going to want to send them to the doctor to get a note for a cold.” With the planning in place, they are making sure to take the steps needed to have clear measurements of the impact. “One of our actions for this year is to articulate and set up a structure where each of our three high schools use the same mechanism to identify root causes of chronic absence for different groups of students [that allows them] to tweak existing interventions to address those root causes because we know one-size-fits-all is just going to miss the point.”
Most Helpful Change?
When asked what was most helpful when starting their initiative to address chronic absence, Charles said, “The overall structure of making this one of the five focus areas for district improvement has been a game changer…having this as a district-wide goal keeps us tethered, connected, talking about it, and has facilitated these teams to become more collaborative. I cannot over emphasize the value of that collaborative, all-in approach that is becoming more organic every year.” One last piece of advice from Charles: “ We’re playing the long game and I think one of the critical shifts for us with our strategic framework has been getting away from a yearly goal. If you don’t stick with a goal of this scope for three, four, or five years you’re probably hampering your ability to make a difference in the long term.”